Scientists Develop A New Method To Upload Knowledge To Brain

At HRL Laboratories, scientists demonstrated how successfully brain activity can be altered for improving learning and to effectively ‘upload’ knowledge to the brain. In this experiment, improvement in both cognitive and motor skills was seen.

Although academics like touting their love of learning, the actual act of learning new skill sucks. Obviously it is good to see someone see someone gain complete knowledge of guitar quickly while you just learn only few chords in months. As per scientists, the brain can be hacked with the help of low current electrical brain stimulation. With this, the process of learning can be improved and hastened.

Till date, this is the closest one has come for recreation of ‘Knowledge upload’ as was seen in ‘The Matrix’. In this study, novices were taught to pilot an airplane in a realistic simulator just like real pilots use. While instructions were received by the control group and the simulator was practiced like normal, an enhancement was seen by the experimental group. After the brain patterns of 6 military and commercial pilots were measured by researchers, the patterns were transmitted to the brains electrically with a special cap. With extra stimulation in the brain, the performance was better than 33 percent.

Obviously, this doesn’t refer to plugging a cord in the head and having a complete knowledge of a particular thing just in few minutes. However, researchers believe that what has been developed has real-world and current applicability.

HRL’s Information and System Sciences Laboratory’s Dr. Matthew Philips states that implementation of brain stimulation can be possible for classes such as language learning, SAT prep and drivers’ training. Although with stimulation, the brain just forms the pathways that are created with years of practice, but efforts have to be put in from your side too.

1 COMMENT

What they did observe is that the variance for the stimulation groups was 33% less than the sham group. So there was less variability in performance, even though overall average performance was no different.